I have the filter set to catch comments with more than one link in them to shield us from the stream of porn and financial junk e-mails that we would otherwise get here. I scan it daily, and we sometimes have upwards of 400 spam e-mails a day to delete.

If anybody posts in the future and doesn’t see their comment on the site for some reason, e-mail me and let me know. I can retrieve messages from the spam filter quickly and easily, but I might otherwise miss your message in my daily scans of the junk e-mail if I don’t know to look for it.

I tried to keep your on your toes, and now you’re keeping me on my toes. Kudos.

She is right in her comment above that I heard her out and then decided against siding with her against the pastor and his church. Since that point in time, she has made it a point to attack me personally on this website any time I make comments on local or national politics that she feels are out of line with her views.

I had decided not to share the story about her push to have us remove our columnist because I didn’t think it appropriate to air her dirty laundry in a public setting. She unfortunately has chosen to do so now, at least in part, without offering full details of her story, just the parts that she hopes will make our readers think ill of me, and so I bring the rest of the story up now only to defend myself against her malicious attack here.

It saddens me that someone would try to take advantage of me in this way – both in the first instance, to try to use her relationship with me to gain a measure of personal revenge against somebody with whom she was in a dispute, and then now, to reference the backstory to my rebuff of that inappropriate request in passing with only bare details so as to make me out to be a horrible person and then take the high and mighty road by saying that she is going to move on.

Best wishes, Michelle.

And just to flesh out what Wayne had said about the Obama/Wright situation:

Before breaking ties with Jeremiah Wright, Obama – who attended this church for close to 20 years – said, “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign.” (1)

Yet, during an interview with Chicago Sun-Times reporter Cathleen Falsani, when asked if he still attends Trinity, Obama replied, “Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service. Ever been there? Good service.” (2)

So, if Obama was telling the truth when he said he was at Trinity “every week,” he was there when Wright preached at least some of his incendiary sermons. If he wasn’t there to hear Wright, then he lied when he said he attended “every week.”

Also, Obama appeared on the cover of The Trumpet, Trinity’s magazine, several times. Wright had his outrageous words that “have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit” (according to Obama’s belated denunciation), printed within the covers of these magazines, yet Obama claims to have had no knowledge of them until the beginning of his presidential campaign?

A sitting United States Senator most definitely has staff tracking EVERY mention in the media. And believe me, if you’re mentioned in a magazine, your staff is posing over the magazine, checking every jot and tittle.

Without a doubt, Obama was aware of Wright’s beliefs prior to starting his presidential campaign.

(1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barack-obama/on-my-faith-and-my-church_b_91623.html
(2) http://falsani.blogspot.com/2008/04/barack-obama-2004-god-factor-interview.html